Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Footnotes
Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2009–2025), in 5 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Footnotes force scrolling to the bottom or awkward pop-oversUnreviewed
20092026- Clicking footnote anchor links jumps the page and makes readers lose their place2025-07-02
- Footnotes force scrolling to the bottom or awkward pop-overs to read2024-06-24
- Having to jump back and forth to read footnotes, and popups still feel intrusive2024-06-24
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 8 complaints
- Clicking footnote anchor links jumps the page and makes readers lose their place2025-07-02
- Superscript number links give no hint of what the footnote contains, like bad 'click here' links2025-07-02
- Hidden footnote text can't be found with browser search2025-07-01
- Footnotes force scrolling to the bottom or awkward pop-overs to read2024-06-24
- Having to jump back and forth to read footnotes, and popups still feel intrusive2024-06-24
- Mixed footnotes force constant context-switching and clicks to tell which are worth reading2023-08-02
- Readers must check each footnote to tell citations from content, causing context switches2020-07-28
- Clicking a footnote jumps to the page bottom instead of showing the note2009-01-30